by Sándor Márai
“Perhaps it was all because of those journeys,” thought the General.
He thought this because his parents had not had an easy marriage. The Officer of the Guards went hunting, and because he could not destroy the world of other places and other people—foreign cities, Paris, castles,foreign tongues, foreign manners—he slaughtered bears, deer, and stags. Yes, perhaps it was because of the journeys. He got to his feet and stood in front of the sway-bellied white porcelain stove that once had warmed his mother’s bedroom. It was a large stove, at least a century old, and it radiated heat like some indolent corpulent gentleman intent on mitigating his own egoism with an easy act of charity. Clearly his mother had always suffered from the cold here. This castle in the depths of the forest with its vaulted rooms was too dark for her; hence the light-colored silks on the walls. And she froze, because there was always a wind in the forest, even in summer, bringing with it the smell of mountain streams when they fill with the melting snow and run in spates, flooding their banks. She froze, and the white stove was kept burning all the time. She was waiting for a miracle. She had come to Eastern Europe because the passion she felt had overwhelmed her reason. The Officer of the Guards had made her acquaintance on a tour of duty when he was diplomatic courier at the embassy in Paris in the 1850s. They were introduced to each other at a ball, and somehow this meeting had an aura of inevitability. The music played and the Officer of the Guards said in French to the Count’s daughter, “In our country feelings are more intense and more decisive.” It was the embassy ball. Outside, the street was white; it was snowing. At this moment the Emperor of France made his entrance into the ballroom. Everyone made a deep obeisance. The Emperor’s dress coat was blue and his waistcoat white; slowly he raised his gold lorgnon to his eyes. As they both straightened up again, their eyes met. Already they knew that their lives must be together. Pale and self-conscious, they smiled at each other. Music could be heard from the next room. The young French girl said, “Your country—where is it?” and smiled again with a faraway look. The Officer of the Guards told her the name of his homeland. It was the first intimate word to pass between them.
It was autumn when they came home, almost a year later. The foreign lady sat deep inside the coach, swathed in veils and coverlets. They took the mountain route across Switzerland and the Tyrol. In Vienna they were received by the Emperor and Empress. The Emperor was benevolent, just the way he was always described in children’s textbooks. “Beware,” he said. “In the forest where he’s taking you, there are bears. He’s a bear too.” And he smiled. Everyone smiled. It was a sign of great favor that the Emperor should joke with the French wife of the Hungarian Officer of the Guards. “Majesty,” she replied, “I shall tame him with music, as Orpheus tamed the wild beast.” They journeyed on through fruit-scented meadows and woods. After they crossed the frontier, mountains and cities dwindled away, and the lady began to weep. “Darling, I feel dizzy. There is no end to all of this.” It was the Puszta that made her dizzy, the deserted plain stretching away under the numbing, shimmering blanket of autumn air, now bare after the harvest, transected by primitive roads along which they jolted for hour after hour, while cranes wheeled in the empty sky and the fields of maize on either side lay plundered and broken as if a retreating army had passed through at the end of a war, leaving the landscape a wasteland. The Officer of the Guards sat silently in the coach, his arms crossed. From time to time he ordered a horse to be brought, and he rode for long distances alongside the carriage, observing his native land as if he were seeing it for the first time. He looked at the low houses, with their green shutters and white verandas, where they spent the nights, Magyar houses with their thick-planted gardens all around them, the cool rooms in which every piece of furniture, even the smell in the cupboards, was familiar to him, and the landscape whose melancholy solitude moved him as never before. He saw with his wife’s eyes the wells with their hanging buckets, the parched fields, the rosy clouds above the plain in the sunset. His homeland opened itself before them, and with a beating heart the officer sensed that the landscape that now embraced them also held the secret of their fate. His wife sat in the coach and said nothing. Sometimes she raised a handkerchief to her face, and as she did so, her husband would bend down toward her out of the saddle and cast a questioning glance into her tear-filled eyes. But with a gesture she signaled that they should continue. Their lives were joined together now.
At first the castle was a comfort to her. It was so large, and the forest and the mountains wrapped themselves around it to isolate it so completely from the plain that it seemed to her to be a home within a new and foreign homeland. And every month a wagon from Paris, from Vienna, would arrive bringing furniture, linens, damasks, engravings, even a spinet, because she wished to tame the wild beasts with music. The first snow was already on the mountains as they finally settled in and began to live their lives there; it surrounded the castle and laid siege to it like a grim northern army. At night deer and stags slipped out of the forest to stand motionless under the moonlight in the snow, heads cocked as they observed the lighted windows with their grave animal eyes that gave back a mysterious blue glow, and the music escaping from the castle reached their ears. “Do you see them?” said the young woman as she sat at the keyboard, and laughed. In February the cold drove the wolves down out of the mountains; the servants and the huntsmen built a bonfire of brushwood in the park, and the wolves, under its spell, circled it and howled. The Officer of the Guards drew a knife and went after them; his wife watched from the window. There was something insurmountable between them. But they loved each other.
The General moved to stand before the portrait of his mother. It was the work of a Viennese artist who had also painted the Empress with her hair down, gathered into loose plaits. The Officer of the Guards had seen this portrait in the Emperor’s study in the Hofburg. In the portrait the Countess was wearing a rose-colored straw hat decorated with flowers, the kind of hat the girls of Florence wear in the summer. The painting in its gold frame hung over the cherry-wood chest with its many drawers, which had also belonged to his mother. The General set both hands on it as he leaned to look up at the work of the Viennese artist. The young woman held her head to one side, gazing gravely and softly into the distance as if posing a question that was in itself the message of the picture. Her features were noble, her neck, her hands in their crocheted gloves and her forearms as sensual as her white shoulders and the sweep of her décolleté. She did not belong here. The battle between husband and wife was fought without words. Their weapons were music, hunting, travels, and evening receptions, when the castle was lit up as if it were on fire, the stables were jammed with horses and carriages, and on every fourth step of the great staircase a heiduch stood as stiff as a mannequin holding up a twelve-armed silver candelabrum, while melodies, light, voices and the scent of bodies swirled through the rooms as if life itself were a desperate feast, a sublime and tragic celebration that would end when the horns rang out to announce an unholy summons to the assembled guests. The General could remember evenings like that. Sometimes the coachmen and their horses had to make camp around the bonfires in the snowy park because the stables were full. And once even the Emperor came, although in this country he bore the title of King. He came in a carriage, escorted by horsemen with white plumes in their helmets. He stayed for two days, went hunting in the forest, lived in the other wing of the castle, slept in an iron bedstead, and danced with the lady of the house. As they danced, they talked together and the young wife’s eyes filled with tears. The King stopped dancing, bowed, kissed her hand, and led her into the next room, where his entourage was standing in a semicircle. He led her to the Officer of the Guards and kissed her hand again.
“What did you talk about?” the Officer of the Guards asked his wife later, much later.
But his wife did not say. Nobody ever learned what the King had said to the young wife who had come from a foreign country and wept as she danced. It went on being
a local topic of conversation for a long time.
4
The castle was a closed world, like a great granite mausoleum full of the moldering bones of generations of men and women from earlier times, in their shrouds of slowly disintegrating gray silk or black cloth. It enclosed silence itself as if it were a prisoner persecuted for his beliefs, wasting away numbly, unshaven and in rags on a pile of musty rotting straw in a dungeon. It also enclosed memories as if they were the dead, memories that lurked in damp corners the way mushrooms, bats, rats, and beetles lurk in the mildewed cellars of old houses. Door-latches gave off the traces of a once-trembling hand, the excitement of a moment long gone, so that even now another hand hesitated to press down on them. Every house in which passion has loosed itself on people in all its fury exudes such intangible presences.
The General looked at the portrait of his mother. He knew every feature of the narrow, fine-boned face. The eyes gazed down through time with sad and somnolent disdain. It was the look with which women of an earlier era had mounted the scaffold, scorning both those for whom they were giving their lives and those who were taking their lives from them. His mother’s family owned a castle in Brittany, by the sea. The General must have been about eight years old the summer he was taken there. By this time they were able to travel by train, albeit very slowly. The suitcases in their linen covers embroidered with his mother’s initials swayed in the luggage nets. In Paris, it was raining. The child sat in a carriage upholstered in blue silk, looking through the hazy glass of the windows at the city glistening in the raindrops like the slippery underbelly of a great fish. He saw the rearing outlines of roofs and great chimneys that slanted up against the dirty curtains of wet sky, seeming to prophesy the secret truths of unfamiliar and unknowable fates. Women walked laughing through the downpour, lifting their skirts with one hand, their teeth glinting as if the rain, the strangecity, and the French language were something both wonderful and comic that only the child failed to comprehend. He was eight years old and sat gravely in the coach beside his mother, facing the maid and the governess, sensing that some task had been imposed upon him. Everyone’s eyes were on him, the little savage from a faraway country, from the forest with the bears. He articulated his French words with circumspect deliberation and care. He was aware that now he spoke for his father, the castle, the hounds, the forest, and the entire homeland he had left behind. A great gate opened, the carriage entered a large courtyard, French servants made their bows in front of a broad staircase. It all felt a little hostile. He was led through rooms in which everything occupied its own painfully meticulous and intimidating space. In the large salon onthe second floor he was received by his French grandmother. Her eyes were gray and there was a black shadow on her upper lip; her hair, which must once have been red but now was a dirty non-color, as if time itself had forgotten to wash it, was piled high on her head. She kissed the child and with her bony white hands tilted his head back a little so that she could gaze down into his face. “Tout de même,” she said to his mother, who was standing beside him anxiously, as if he were taking an examination thatwas about to reveal something.
Later, lime-blossom tisane was brought. Everything smelled so strange that the child felt faint. Round about midnight he began to weep and vomit. “I want Nini,” he cried, his voice choked with sobs as he lay in bed, deathly pale.
Next day, he was running a high fever and was incoherent. Solemn doctors arrived wearing black frock coats with watch chains fixed into the middle buttonhole of their white waistcoats; as they bent over the child, their beards and clothes exuded the same smell as the furnishings of the palace, which was also the smell of his grandmother’s hair and the smell on her breath. He thought he would die if the smell didn’t go away. By the end of the week his fever still had not abated and his pulse was weakening. That was when they telegraphed for Nini.
It took four days for the nurse to reach Paris.
The muttonchop-whiskered majordomo failed to recognize her at the station, and so she set off on foot to the palace, carrying her traveling bag made of crochet work. She arrived like a migrating bird. She spoke no French, she did not know the streets, and she was never able to explain how in the middle of the strange city she had found the palace and her sick charge. She came into the room and lifted the dying child out of his bed; his body was no longer moving, only his eyes glittered. She set him in her lap, held him tight in her arms and gently began to rock him. On the third day he was given extreme unction. That evening, Nini came out of the sickroom and said in Hungarian to the Countess, “I think he is going to pull through.”
She shed no tears, she was merely exhausted after six nights without sleep. She took some food from home out of the crocheted bag and began to eat. For six days she kept the child alive by the power of her breath. The Countess kneeled outside the door, weeping and praying. Everyone was with her—the French grandmother, the servants, a young priest with slanted eyebrows who came and went at all hours.
The doctors’ visits tapered off. The mother and son left for Brittany, taking Nini, but leaving the grandmother behind in Paris, shocked and hurt. Of course, nobody uttered a word about the cause of the child’s illness, but everybody knew: the boy needed love, and when all the strangers had bent over him and the unbearable smell had surrounded him on all sides, he had chosen death. In Brittany the wind sang and the waves churned against the age-old rocks. Red cliffs rose up out of the sea. Nini, calm and assured, smiled at the ocean and the sky as if they were already familiar to her. The four corners of the castle were surmounted by ancient turrets of undressed stone from which the Countess’s ancestors had kept watch against Surcouf the pirate. The boy was soon brown from the sun and full of laughter. He was no longer afraid: he knew that the two of them, he and Nini, were the strong ones. They sat on the sand, the frills on Nini’s dress blew in the wind, and everything smelled of salt, not just the air but the flowers, too. When the tide went out in the mornings, they found sea spiders with hairy legs in the crevices of the red rocks, and crabs with red stomachs and star-shaped jelly fish.
In the castle courtyard there was an incredibly ancient fig tree that looked like some oriental sage who only had the simplest of stories left to tell. Its leaves made a thick canopy for the cool, sweet air underneath.
In the middle of the day, when the sea was no more than a muffled grumble, the nurse would sit here quietly with the child.
“I want to be a poet,” the boy said once, glancing up obliquely.
He stared at the sea, his blond curls stirring in the warm wind and his eyes, half-closed, interrogating the horizon. The nurse put her arms around him and squeezed his head against her breast. “No, you’re going to be a soldier.”
“Like Father?” The child shook his head. “Father is a poet too, didn’t you know? He’s always thinking about something else.”
“That’s true,” said the nurse with a sigh. “Don’t go into the sun, my angel, it’ll give you a headache.”
They sat for a long time under the fig tree, listening to the familiar roaring of the sea. It was the same sound made by the forest back home. The child and the nurse thought about the world and how everything in it is related.
5
It is the kind of idea that comes later to most people. Decades pass, one walks through a darkened room in which someone has died, and suddenly one recalls long forgotten words and the roar of the sea. It’s as if those few words had captured the whole meaning of life, but afterwards one always talks about something else.
When they made the journey home from Brittany in the fall, the Officer of the Guards was waiting for them in Vienna. The child was enrolled in the military academy. He received a little sword, long trousers, and a shako. The sword was buckled onto him, and on Sundays he and the other cadets were taken for walks along the Graben in their dark-blue tunics. They looked like children playing soldiers. They wore white gloves and gave charming salutes.
The military academy was situated o
n a hill just outside Vienna. It was a yellow-painted building, and from the windows on the third floor one could see the old city with its streets running straight as a die, and the Emperor’s summer palace, the roofs of Schönbrunn, and the paths bordered by pleached trees. In the white corridors with their vaulted ceilings, in the classrooms, the dining hall, and the dormitories, everything was so reassuringly there that this seemed to be the only place on earth where every object that otherwise was disorderly or superfluous in life finally was brought into harmony and proper function. The instructors were old officers. Everything smelled of saltpeter. Every dormitory housed thirty children of roughly the same age who slept on narrow iron beds, just like the Emperor. Over the door hung a crucifix decorated with a twig of willow blessed with holy water. A blue night-light burned in the darkness. In the mornings, they were wakened by a bugle call. In winter, the water in the tin washbasins was sometimes frozen over; when that happened, the adjutants fetched cans of warm water from the kitchen.
They learned Greek, and ballistics, and the proper comportment of a soldier in battle, and history. The child was pale, and coughed. In fall the chaplain took him for a walk each afternoon in Schönbrunn, strolling down the allée. Where a fountain gushed out of crumbling moss-covered moldered stones, the water made a stream of gold in the sun. They walked between the rows of pleached trees, the boy conscious of his bearing, raising his white gloved hand in a stiff, correct salute to the veterans who came by in their dress uniforms as if every day were the Emperor’s birthday. Once, a woman came from the opposite direction, head bare, a white lace parasol on her shoulder; she was walking rapidly, and as she passed them the chaplain bowed deeply.
